Page 110 of Haunt Me

Their paths crossed because I made them.

In the storm I apparently helped call down without meaning to, my husband stopped his truck for a stranger. Something about the shape of that moment rippled all the way back to wherever I exist.

I’m still working out what that means about me.

I felt it again the second she pulled his flannel on. I know exactly how that shirt smells like cedar and engine grease, a smell that’s entirely Samuel. I felt her breathe it in without realizing she was doing it. Some unconscious comfort settled over her shoulders along with the fabric. Something in me settled right alongside her, watching it happen.

I don’t know what to do with how that made me feel.

It wasn’t jealousy. I need to be clear about that, even here, even to myself. It was something closer to recognition, watching a stranger wrap herself in a piece of him without knowing yet what she was holding. There was a quiet aching rightness I felt reaching into that sky and pulling a storm down out of it. Like I was finally doing something instead of only watching something happen to the people I love.

Samuel stopped for her. He could’ve driven past her, and some cold, calculating corner of me almost expected him to, given everything the last few months have taken from him. But he chose not to. It’s the first glimpse I’ve had of the Samuel I used to know since the day I died. Tonight he wasn’t the man drowning himself in a bottle. Not the one who can’t walk into his own garage without falling apart. Just him, stubborn and kind to his bones, unable to leave someone stranded even when driving by would’ve been so much easier.

I’d almost forgotten what that version of him looked like. I’d started to wonder if I’d have to keep pulling storms down out of clear skies for the rest of whatever this existence is, just to catch glimpses of him underneath all the wreckage.

Then, later tonight, something happened that I still can’t stop turning over.

He almost drank. I felt that too, the same way I felt the storm gathering in my chest before it ever reached the sky, some cold certainty that he was about to undo weeks of fighting in one careless swallow. And before I understood what I was doing, before I’d decided anything the way I decided the storm, I was there. Not watching. There, close enough that when I yelled his name, he heard it.

Not felt it. Not sensed some vague warmth he’d talk himself out of by morning.

Heard it.

I don’t know how I did that. I don’t know if it was the same muscle I used on the storm, stretched further than I meant to stretch it, or something else entirely, some new door finally cracking open because I’d already proven to myself, tonight of all nights, that I’m not as powerless as I spent months believing I was. All I know is that for one unmistakable second, my husband heard his dead wife tell him to stop, and he stopped.

That should feel like triumph. Mostly, it does.

But underneath the triumph there’s an ache I can’t seem to outrun no matter how much ground I apparently cover now, storms and voices and stopped feet on paths not meant to be walked. I can make myself heard. I still can’t make myself felt.

I couldn’t press my hand against his chest tonight and steady the tremor in it the way I used to. Couldn’t wrap my arms around him in that truck and let him shake against something solid instead of empty air.

Whatever I am now, I can throw my voice across a distance I don’t understand and stop a bottle from reaching his mouth, and I still can’t do the one thing I actually want most, which is to hold him.

I don’t know if that gap will ever close. I don’t know if wanting it to is its own kind of greed, given everything I’ve already been allowed to do that the dead aren’t supposed to be able to do at all.

The Light gathers the way it always does now, like my wanting has become loud enough to summon it whether I call for it or not.

“He heard me tonight.”

“That is new.”

“I know.” I look toward the dark where the storm’s already breaking apart, spent, the way I feel spent in some way I don’t have a name for. “Is that allowed? Or did I take something I wasn’t supposed to have?”

“A cup does not ask the well how much it’s permitted to hold. It only asks whether it can carry what it’s given without breaking.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“It isn’t meant to be. It’s meant to be true.”

“Am I breaking?”

The Light doesn’t answer that one, not directly. Its silence sits heavier than any riddle it’s given me yet.

“There is something else you should hear tonight,” it says instead, “before you mistake tonight for more than it is.”

“Say it, then.”

“You can shape the road two people walk. You can bring a storm down to put them on the same stretch of it at the same hour. That much, apparently, is yours to spend.” A pause, patient, the way it always is. “But the heart is not a road. It does not bend because a storm tells it to. Whatever grows between them, if anything grows at all, will not be your doing. You can put two people in the same room. You cannot put love in either of their chests. That was never given to you, and I would not want you to spend yourself chasing it.”